


Forgotten Myths

by UnFunny (Quippy)



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Akechi Goro Lives, Dream Logic, Eldritch God Shenanigans, M/M, Metaverse (Persona 5), Metaverse runs off of Fae Logic, Not Beta Read, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Persona 3 References, Ren loses himself to the Metaverse, Third Semester (Persona 5), Third Semester AU, names have power, persona 3 portable references
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:16:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26755675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quippy/pseuds/UnFunny
Summary: How do you fight a literal god, becoming the manifestation of rebellion itself to kill that god, and just casually step back on a train to the countryside to return to indifferent parents and an empty void where a future was supposed to be? How do you pretend like the past year never happened? Act like you didn’t nearly die a thousand times, didn’t make the dearest friends, or the most ruthless of enemies.How do you pretend like you never fell in love with the one person in the world you couldn’t save, no matter how desperately you wanted to?You can’t, of course. You can’t do these things. Ren can’t do these things.---Ren finds himself wandering the empty Shujin Academy surrounded by the voices of his friends speaking of things that can't be. He's meant to go to the school entrance and leave. He's meant to wake to find the world changed. He's meant to find the gift Maruki has created for him in the form of Akechi Goro brought back from the dead.Never one to do as he's told, Ren takes a different path and unknowingly sends the world speeding towards destruction as a result.
Relationships: Akechi Goro & Amamiya Ren, Akechi Goro & Amamiya Ren & Yoshizawa Sumire | Yoshizawa Kasumi, Akechi Goro/Amamiya Ren, Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira, Akechi Goro/Persona 5 Protagonist, Amamiya Ren & Phantom Thieves of Hearts, Other Relationship Tags to Be Added, Yoshizawa Sumire | Yoshizawa Kasumi & Amamiya Ren
Comments: 6
Kudos: 56





	Forgotten Myths

The thing is…Ren doesn’t want to go back to a normal life.

He’s seen too much, done too much,  _ been too much. _

He stole hearts, saved people, changed the world and even got a bit of revenge in as a nice bonus. How do you go back from that? How do you fight a literal god, becoming the manifestation of rebellion itself to  _ kill  _ that god, and just casually step back on a train to the countryside to return to indifferent parents and an empty void where a future was supposed to be? How do you pretend like the past year never happened? Act like you didn’t nearly die a thousand times, didn’t make the dearest friends, or the most ruthless of enemies. 

How do you pretend like you never fell in love with the one person in the world you couldn’t save, no matter how desperately you wanted to?

You can’t, of course. You can’t do these things. Ren can’t do these things.

He’s killed a god. He’s saved the world. Is it selfish to ask for something in return? For a chance to not go back to the way things were? He doesn’t want to think so, though there is the part of him that says otherwise.

He’s dreaming now. He knows because the world outside is dark and shimmering and the halls of his school are cold and empty. He knows because the voices of his friend’s echo around him, making wishes that can’t be, speaking of lives they want to live. He knows because he doesn’t have the choice he’s presented with in the waking world, doesn’t have this opportunity.

There’s a pull that tells him to go home, that drags him down the halls to the front door of the school. He knows that if he steps through he will wake up in his bed, the world waiting for him. But the pull only tells him to go  _ home, _ and somewhere along the line home was the twisting unreality of the Metaverse just as much as it was the cafe that had come to be a sanctuary to him.

The door ahead of him will lead him to his uncomfortable bed in his dusty attic that he loves so dearly. It will lead him to the morning where he will meet Sae and turn himself in. To the years in Juvenile detention and the long stretch of unbearable mundanity set to follow. To the life where Arsene is but a dream and Joker merely something he pretended at, not the expression of his true being, the manifestation of everything he truly is beneath all the many masks.

Something tugs at him to go home and there is something - someone - urging him through those doors. The whisper suggestion of  _ just do what you're told _ hums at the back of his mind. And that, more than anything spurs him down a different path.

He’s never been good at doing what he’s told.

The door is forgotten, abandoned, rejected. Ren turns on his heel and walks on silent feet through the halls of his school, now twisting and warping around him, trying futility to bring him back to where he was. He’s learned how to walk the shadowed paths of Mementos, how to feel the turn of the world beneath his feet. It’s less about knowing where you’re going and more about keeping your balance as you go.

There is a door that will lead him back to his world.

There is another door though, that will lead him somewhere else.

Hidden down miles and miles of identical halls. Up and down and sideways stairs that break from any sense of gravity and architecture along the way. The path he walks is more metaphor than movement, familiar in its alien design.

He just wants to find that other door, that other familiar world. Maybe walk on the other side for a while. All he’s looking for is a little more time. He is being selfish, he knows, but he is not entirely a selfish person. There is a difference, a distinction. He isn’t willing to leave those that remain forever, he isn’t cruel. He knows how much loss burns at a person, how deeply grief tears into a soul.

Perhaps, if he’s being honest - he is never honest, though, not even to himself, not until it’s far too late - it’s not time he’s looking for, but someone to spend that time with.

He finds the other door tucked at the back of a forgotten memory, buried within a deck of cards. He shuffles it out with deft fingers and reminders from Lala in his ears of how to stack the deck in your favor. He finds it wedged between the King of Hearts and the Joker and thinks of Chihiya telling him how people use playing cards to divine the future too.

The door he’s searched has a thousand locks made from all the promises Ren can’t break. He is fortunate for the logic of dreams, and reaches into his chest to pull a sliver of metal from his heart. It’s shaped like a bullet in a head, like a blade in the back, like the beak of a crow who has no intention of giving back what he’s stolen. It doesn’t take much to bend it into a pick and twists it into each promise gently. Prying them open with addendums and rain checks and  _ maybe tomorrows _ so as not to make himself guilty of shattering them outright.

Whoever has made this dream digs in deep to try and pull him away, tug him back to where the dream is orderly and neat with narrow halls leading him to the waking world. He recognizes the voice, but the name and the person behind it mean less and less with each step deeper into the Between Ren has taken. He remembers the impression of an affable smile, a willingness to help and an uncertainty of how to do so, a lab coat and a sadness that weighs heavy shoulders.

He remembers the world on the other side of the door that person tried to hide from him better.

Shadows twist into strange shapes in that place, the world itself turning and changing to match what all the dreamers of the world imagine it to be. In that place he is not a boy named Ren. He is something else. A free thing, a wanderer, a thief. He is the Trickster there. 

The name doesn’t settle on him like a second skin, but instead rises up from deep within. He has always been the Trickster, it's everything else that has been the mask.

He opens the door wide. For a moment it is the bars of a jail door before he sees the path beyond and then what has been a door is nothing at all, a half remembered thing gone before it ever existed. Places Between are like that. He is like that too, he thinks.

Something twisted and dark born of best intentions turned sour latches itself to his ankle, tries to roughly pull him back. It’s a tentacle, bloated and corrupted, trying hard to drag him back into the depths of the world above, the world he’s rejected. He’s killed something like it before, he thinks as he stomps it off with a pointed boot he wasn’t wearing a moment ago. He’d reshaped the deepest part of himself into a figure capable of such things, crafted a weapon of all his rage and fired it into the face of everything that would attempt to control him.

The eldritch god screams in pain, burned and blistered by the bright blue flames that surround him. He shakes off the desperate call for him to return, ignores the increasingly frantic grabs for his attention and obedience with the lazy ease of a cat. In the process he knocks away all the people he’s never been, the people who’s faces he wore like masks, who’s shape never quite fit right on him. He lets the name that was his fall off his shoulders and crumble at his feet as he steps forward.

It’s not for forever, he hums to himself as he slinks into the dark corners of the Metaverse. Just for a time. Just for awhile. Long enough to find a memory and live in it for a time. No time at all, he’d even be able to steal something pretty and priceless before returning. Maybe more than one…

* * *

In the world the Trickster leaves behind, the dreamers wake. 

A newly made god nurses a burn and plans on how to account for the sudden change in plans. A city reshapes to fit the conflicting ideal worlds of its populace. A band of thieves forget what they stole for in the light of all they have. 

No one notices the impossibility of their lives. They can’t see the cracks in the world around them or feel the strain of a reality so badly contorted as to collapse in on itself. If occasionally they notice their loved ones eyes glitter gold in the light or their thoughts tend to drift when they try to remember certain things, then it must be due to all the happiness that burns in their chests.

In a hospital bed, still and forgotten in the sea of changes that rages around him, a Crow rests and recovers.

In a world born of dreams and metaphors, a Trickster forgets.

**Author's Note:**

> Is posting four separate stories four days in a row too much? It's probably too much. I'm still not going to stop posting WIPs lol
> 
> This one was inspired by a couple things. First being what I thought was happening during my first run through the Third Semester, namely that I thought for a long time that Maruki actually didn't have a Persona, he was just being manipulated into thinking he had a Persona by something else that was using him to take over the world in Yaldabaoth's place (my thought at the time that it could actually be Yaldabaoth). The fact that his persona was an Eldritch God only furthered this theory until it became obvious that I was completely wrong lol
> 
> Another big inspiration for this is my headcanon that the Metaverse is just a Fae realm that also has to adhere to dream logic and metaphors. The emphasis on making deals, the importance of names (and hiding your true name) as well as the Trickster imagery really sold that to me and I really wanted to write something that dove into that a bit.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading and please leave me a comment letting me know what you think!


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